Perth – Are we there yet?

G’day mates! Yes, indeed we are here. In fact we arrived yesterday (Thurs) after our epic Qantas flight from London Heathrow to Perth. It was supposed to take 16.5 hours but when we got on board there was a happy announcement that it would only be 15.5- hurrah! And that takes you and your ridiculous amounts of luggage, the 15 thousand kilometres to Australia, direct.

Luckily, the day before’s not-so-happy message ‘Important Update regarding Inflight Entertainment for your flight’ …….ie it might not work 🙀🙀 turned out to be a false alarm, as they managed to fix it just in time. So, we passed a few hours enjoying the good selection of movies, TV shows, music, games and even an audiobook. Jane gobbled up 3 movies – Conclave 4*, Anora 4* and Wild Robot 5* . I watched Lee 4* and then flipped from one thing to the next.

The flight, in this Boeing 787 Dreamliner, was generally pretty smooth but despite this, we got v little sleep, due possibly to over-excitement. As we flew into Perth we had great views of the long, empty beaches and the city as a whole. We also flew over the surrounding countryside which looked parched and where there had been bushfires in the weeks before, apparently.

The airport is only quite small and we were quickly through before facing the man at Bio Security. We’d been given several warnings about how strict they are about you not bringing in guns, food, soil, drugs etc and so I was keen to declare to the man that we only had tea bags, Minstrels and squirty squash but had not found a box for these to tick on the form. His response to this was that there wasn’t room on the form to create tick boxes for everything and, pointing to the exit, he told us to ‘Get Out!’. This was all said with a smile – Welcome to Australia 😁

Once out, we phoned our hotel, the nearby Country Comfort and the v nice lady came to pick us up in their courtesy bus. The drive back took about 10mins through the wide streets of suburban Perth. It looked very lovely in the midday cloud with manicured front lawns and beautiful trees of every shade. Jane even spotted some parakeets in the branches of the Gum trees.

We had a two hour Power Nap and then woke ourselves up to try and avoid the jet lag. We had a really nice tea in their Firehouse Restaurant (pulled pork bao buns and chicken satay skewers followed by a lemon meringue , all to share). And our two schooners of beer were just the ticket. I think we’re gonna love it here ❤️ 🇦🇺